[R] Find a rectangle of maximal area

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Hans W Borchers
<hwborchers at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Still I believe that a clever approach might be possible avoiding the need to
> call a commercial solver. I am getting this hope from one of Jon Bentley's
> articles in the series Programming Pearls.
>

Is this the 'Largest Empty Rectangle' problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_empty_rectangle

I had a look at some of the references from Wikipedia, but they all
follow a similar pattern, one I have noticed in many computer science
journal articles:

 1. State a problem that looks tricky.
 2. Say "We have an efficient algorithm for the problem stated in #1"
 3. Proceed to derive, using much algebra and theory, the efficient algorithm.
 4. Stop.

The idea of actually producing some dirty, filthy, actual code to
implement their shiny algorithms never seems to cross their minds.

 I also found a similar question from 2008 asked on the R-sig-geo
mailing list. That didn't get much help either!

Sorry.

Barry